Dabble, dabble

The past few weeks, I’ve been dabbling with my various languages. I’ve not really studied a great deal in recent months, but I’m slowly picking things up again. I’ve been busy moving into a new apartment, buying a new car, and commuting to Columbus every other weekend (my girlfriend lives there).

It’s sort of funny, in that I seem to have a sort of on again, off again cycle when it comes to being a language nut (or at least, active about it). I’ll go a number of months really hitting languages hard, becoming almost obsessed with it, and then I’ll peter out, and switch my focus to other things. I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but just to reiterate: I used to worry that this “off time” would throw me back to square one, and my experience hasn’t really shown that to be the case, at all. It’s been months since I seriously did anything at all with French, and yet a few days ago, while driving home from Columbus, I listened to about half of the French Assimil program, and understood an awful lot of it with no problem whatsoever. Sure, I’ll need to review and brush up a bit on it, but most of what I learned in the past is still in my head, lying dormant and waiting for me to knock the dust off. Realizing this was certainly a big positive, as it’s made me stress about language maintenance a lot less.

I’ve been reading some German stuff, mostly news and what not from Deutsche Welle. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Subway to Sally, particularly on my drives to and from Columbus. If you study German and haven’t heard of them, do check them out. They’re a bit more palatable to most people than Rammstein. 😉

I also grabbed Lingua Latina, Pars I: Familia Romana through the library, just to check it out. I’ve read the first chapter so far, and it seems pretty intriguing. It’s all in Latin, and it starts out with extremely simple sentences (Roma in Italia est), slowly building up your comprehension as you go along. It seems like a pretty interesting way to go about learning; if I stick with it, I’ll probably end up getting the audio for it.